In an arti­cle on the dollar’s depre­ci­a­tion in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so dras­tic, it has seeped into the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flash­ing not a stack of Ben­jamins, but a fist­ful of euros.

The impli­ca­tion seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bund­chen] and Jay-Z real­ize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anec­dote is to add color (no com­ment) to the story, to break up more mun­dane sen­tences like the one that fol­lows. (“The dollar had been at rel­a­tively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask your­self: by what stan­dards does Jay-Z count as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness? Con­sider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 mil­lion in income during 2005, includ­ing $3 mil­lion for serv­ing as pres­i­dent and CEO of Def Jam Recordings.

+Were all of his busi­ness activ­i­ties con­cen­trated in a single com­pany, Jay-Z would be 73rd on Forbes’s exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion list for that year, just behind the CEO of Colgate-​Palmolive and a few steps up from the CEO of Halliburton.

+ This March, Iconix pur­chased Rocawear, Jay-Z’s cloth­ing line, for $204 mil­lion in cash.

+ In Octo­ber 2006, Anheuser Busch named Jay-Z the co-​brand direc­tor of Bud­weiser Select.

+ This report (PDF) sug­gests that Jay-Z’s net worth is around half a bil­lion dollars.

These facts give us every reason to assume that Jay-Z’s con­scious­ness, espe­cially in when it comes to dol­lars and euros, is some­thing quite other than “popular.” In fact, I’d guess he counts him­self among the people for whom the rel­a­tive value of the dollar is a datum of signal impor­tance. And so it seems odd that the authors would use him as a kind of canary in the world eco­nomic coal mine—as if he were one of the leg­endary shoe shin­ers who asked Joseph Kennedy for a stock tip and thereby let him know that the stock market was oversubscribed.

Make no mis­take: Jay-Z is our Kennedy and we are shin­ing his shoes.

++++++++

*Note: To be fair, it could be that Hammer and Werdigier are propos­ing the video, and not the man, as the indi­ca­tor of “popular consciousness.” But even if that’s true, it’s a neat demon­stra­tion of just how much the def­i­n­i­tion of “popular” has skewed: where once it could mean “of or by the people,” now it almost exclu­sively means “for the people.” To see what a dif­fer­ence a single shift in prepo­si­tion can make, try it out on some of your favorite phrases—pop­u­lar cul­ture, pop­u­lar gov­ern­ment—and see what happens.